JavaScript Fundamentals: Data Types

Let’s take a look at data type fundamentals in JavaScript! Firstly we’ll learn about each of the different data types, before looking at methods we can use to convert our data (i.e. how we turn values into numbers, strings & Booleans).

By the end of the article, you’ll have an increased understanding of working with many of the major data types. Which is a fundamental skill to pickup, as you move forward with JavaScript.

This article is part of a series I’m writing on learning the JavaScript fundamentals. Be sure to follow me if you’d like to keep track!

Data types are classifications of specific types of data. We have numbers, Booleans (true or false), strings (character sequences enclosed in quotes ‘’ or “”) and more complex data types known as arrays and objects (we’ll look at these a bit later).

let a = 1; // a is a numberlet a = "Avocado"; // a is a stringlet a = true; // a is a Booleanlet a; // a is undefined

For example, a, has been defined as a variable using the let keyword. We can assign any data type to it, or even just initialize it by leaving it blank.

Why Does it matter?

When storing data in a variable, it’s important that we know its type, as that determines what we can do with it! For instance, you can add numbers 1 + 1 = 2, and that’s fine. However, if you attempt to add numbers when they have the data type of string “1” + “1” = 11 Your result will be 1 and 1, not the sum equaling 2 as you may have expected. Lets now take a look at each type in detail.

Numbers in JavaScript can be written with or without decimals, such as:

let a = 1;let b = 1.1;

And they can be abbreviated using the e exponent, for example:

let million = 1000000;

// or..

let million = 1e6;

The 6 is the amount of 0’s, which in this case equals one million.

There are a few special values that we often encounter when working with numbers, Infinity, -Infinity and NaN.

If you attempt to divide a number by 0, such as:

3/0 // Infinity

The result will be Infinity. As the JavaScript computes the result outside its largest possible number of 9007199254740992. The opposite would yield:

-3/0 // -Infinity

The value of NaN represents ‘Not a Number’, meaning the value isn’t considered a number. This would generate in illegal expressions, such as:

let a = 100 / "Greg"; // a will be NaN

As of course you can’t divide a number by a string!

However, JavaScript is smart enough to convert your data type in some cases, such as:

let a = 100 / "2" // a will be 50

JavaScript will use type coercion to consider your “2” string to be a number in this case.

As mentioned earlier, strings are sequences of characters that exist within either single or double quotes:

Booleans are used within programs when we need to perform operations based on the evaluation of truth or falsehood. For example, do the received login credentials evaluate to true? Grant access ✔️. Or are they false? Deny access ❌.

An array is a slightly more complex data type, however they are really quite simple to grasp! An array is a way to have multiple values held by a single variable. For example:

let colors = ["red", "green", "blue", "yellow"]

An array is defined by using square brackets [] as in the above example. We’ve assigned an array to the variable colors, contained within are our elements of red, green, blue and yellow.

Note: Our first array element always has the index position of 0. So remember to start counting from 0 instead of 1!

Arrays have a large amount of flexibility, they can have elements added, removed and changed. Let’s now take a look at our final data type..

The object data type is typically used for holding large amounts of related data. Object data values are stored in key/value pairs, the pairs make for a logical way to store and access our data, using curly braces {}, for example:

And that concludes our first look at data types! Lets now see how we can perform data type conversions.

As we’ve now seen, data types are classifications of a particular type of data. And it’s the type that determines which operations are able to be performed on the data. As we write programs, we’ll often need to convert our data types in order to perform tasks.

JavaScript is intelligent enough to convert some values for us, this is known as type coercion:

"15" - "5" // 10"15" / "3" // 5

The above will work as our strings evaluate to numbers. However,

"5" + "5" // 55

If we’re using the + operator, the strings will concatenate! So if we attempted to rely on type coercion in this case, we’d see unexpected results.

For this reason, when writing our own code, we should endeavor to convert data types ourselves — thus reducing potential errors. Lets now take a look at how we can go about that!

Using the String() method, we can explicitly convert values to strings.

For example, lets take the number 100 and convert it to a string literal “100”.

String(100); // "100"

And lets convert a Boolean false into a string literal “false”.

String(false); // "false"

Within a variable, we can convert our value to a string like so:

let name = 5000; // 5000name = String(name); // "5000"

We can check the data type of any value, using typeof, for example:

typeof name; // string

Alternatively, we could do this more concisely like so:

let name = 5000;name.toString(); // "5000"

(5000).toString(); // also returns "5000"

Regardless of the method we choose, by using String() or n.toString(), we can explicitly convert our data into string values.

When the time comes to convert values into numbers, we use the Number() method in a similar manner:

Number("2000"); // 2000

We’ve turned our string “2000” into the number 2000.

We could also convert a Boolean:

Number(true); // 1Number(false); // 0

It should be noted however, that we cannot convert our data type into a number if there are any characters or spaces within the string! If this were to be attempted a NaN (not a number) would be returned.

Converting numbers and strings into Boolean values is a powerful way to start to introduce logic into our programming. For instance, we could detect a missed required field on an input form, if the Boolean returns false.

Understanding and working with data types is a fundamental skill to posses when moving forward with JavaScript. In this article, we looked at data types and how we can work with them, using both type coercion as well as by implicitly performing our own type conversions.

I hope you found this article useful! You can follow me on Medium. I’m also on Twitter. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below. I’ll be glad to help out!